Correction Appended
HEMPSTEAD
ON the border of Garden City and Hempstead, where handsome homes with manicured lawns give way to a crumbling housing project, sits a large, empty house with an unusual guardian.
A homeless man named Charles Tegeler, 47, has slept in the boarded-up, burned-out house on the corner of Hilton Avenue and Jackson Street since August, when the family that owned the house was forced out by an electrical fire. He wards off intruders by night and does repair work for the owner, Dennis Bassett, by day.
Mr. Bassett said that he had hired Mr. Tegeler to do odd jobs over the past two years and that he lets him sleep on his properties because he wants to keep at least one man off the streets.
“No one is looking at the fact that people are living in alleys downtown,” said Mr. Bassett, a real estate agent now living in Garden City. “No one wants to look at that because life is too good on Long Island, because they can go home and lock their doors.”
Although homelessness is more visible in towns like Hempstead, where people huddle in alleys, there are homeless people hidden throughout Long Island. And the problem is growing, say those who work with the homeless.
“I’ve seen an upward trend and I am concerned about it,” said Joan Noguera, executive director of the nonprofit Nassau-Suffolk Coalition for the Homeless.
Any trend is hard to quantify because the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development applied new guidelines this year for counting the homeless. Only those living in emergency shelters, transitional housing, abandoned buildings or on the street and who identified themselves as homeless could be counted.
At the beginning of this year, the coalition’s census of unsheltered homeless people reported 781 homeless people in Nassau County and 1,728 in Suffolk County.
This year, the coalition received $10 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to distribute among about 40 agencies for homeless shelters, food pantries and homeless intervention.
“But the numbers only tell a piece of the story,” Ms. Noguera said.
On Long Island, the problem of homelessness can be camouflaged by its general affluence and by the system that takes in the homeless — shelters on the Island are small, mostly unmarked homes, run by churches or nonprofit groups, that resemble boarding houses. The homeless population is also spread out — living in campgrounds and parks and on beaches — and is harder to see and to count.
“They may be hidden, but they’re there,” Ms. Noguera said.
Homelessness is more widespread on Long Island than it appears, said Samuel Miller, regional interagency homelessness coordinator for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The homeless include seasonal workers, military veterans, people discharged from hospitals, domestic violence victims and youths leaving foster care, he said.
“People don’t realize who the homeless are,” said Mr. Miller, who lives in Suffolk County. “What we see and what is out there are two different things.”
In Suffolk, officials have struggled to house the mentally ill since three major psychiatric hospitals closed in the 1990s. “We had to pick up the pieces at our own expense,” County Executive Steve Levy said. “It placed a tremendous burden on the county, but we have done a pretty good job in trying circumstances.”
In 2003, the average number of families living in motels was 112; in 2007, it has been reduced to an average of one, meaning that sometimes there is none, according to the Suffolk County executive’s office. People are instead housed in shelters with cooking facilities and access to health care and job training.
Nassau is developing a 10-year plan to house the chronically homeless, as part of an effort being undertaken by 320 counties nationwide. The goal is to get people in permanent housing, rather than in motels or shelters.
“Emergency housing is important, but you have to get to the root of the problem,” County Executive Thomas R. Suozzi said.
Using federal, state and county dollars, Nassau will spend $5.8 million for emergency shelter in 2007. It has budgeted $2.1 million for Housing and Urban Development programs, including a homeless intervention program, over the next five years.
Many homeless are not physically on the street, but, like Mr. Tegeler, are in places unfit for living, from houses without basic facilities to barns. Others, including working families, live doubled or tripled up with other families or stay with friends and relatives.
They rely on other help, too.
Last Saturday, as temperatures fell, Hempstead’s homeless and elderly flocked for a free Thanksgiving dinner at the South Hempstead Baptist Church. Down the hill, about 50 laborers lined up in an empty lot near the Home Depot for steak served off a grill by Victor Rodriguez, a prison chaplain based in Hempstead who had gathered donations from restaurants and grocery stores to feed out-of-work laborers, several of them homeless.
Homelessness is widespread among low-income families on the Island because of high rents and a lack of rental property, officials say; only 17 percent of properties are rentals, according to the Long Island Index, an annual study of local economic and social trends, compiled for the nonprofit Rauch Foundation.
To prevent families from becoming homeless, organizations like the Nassau-Suffolk Coalition provide temporary assistance, but only up to $1,000. The average monthly rent on the Island is $1,600 , Ms. Noguera said.
Returning veterans are finding themselves homeless, too. Senator Charles E. Schumer’s office estimated that in 2007, 2,000 homeless veterans live on Long Island.
John A. Sperandeo, chief of social work services at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center at Northport, said it can be hard for those in the military to save money for a down payment or for rent, and many veterans return with new mental and physical disabilities. The Northport hospital runs a homeless program with the Salvation Army that has served 447 veterans this year.
Advocates for the homeless like Jay T. Korth, who runs Catholic Charities’ housing program on the Island, want more housing for lower-income workers built to help stem the number of people becoming homeless. “We need more housing options, we need expansion of what’s there,” he said.
But construction is costly, there is little land to build on, and zoning in most towns makes it hard to build multifamily houses for the working class and working poor, Mr. Korth said.
“The future doesn’t look very good for Long Island, housing-wise,” he said.
Correction: December 2, 2007
An article and an accompanying picture caption last Sunday about homelessness on
